The present invention relates to generating views, and more particularly, this invention relates to generating a representative view for a multipage compilation of data.
When using paging tables to show information, many users find it unusable and very slow to find particular items or groups of items in a paging table. Typical users would rather scroll through the table until the relevant content is found. But scrolling through tables typically presents problems when dealing with large quantities of information. If the user knows what he or she is looking for, he or she can search or filter the table. But if the user wants to look at data in a certain part of the table, it is difficult to know which page of rows to look at. One method is to provide a simple set of links based on a field in the table (like alphabetic links), but that may not provide enough information to guide the user to the preferred page.
What is therefore needed is a way to view summarized information from the table or other multi-page collection of data.